


the prisoner's dilemma

by arbitrarily



Category: Free Fire (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Gunplay, Gunshot Wounds, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-04
Updated: 2017-06-17
Packaged: 2018-11-08 13:47:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 15,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11082843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: “So about dinner – can I take a raincheck?”“You take what you want, girl.”In the end, this is what she’s got: a briefcase full of cash, a trio of gunshot wounds, one makeshift tourniquet, a bounty on her head, and a half-dead Irish terrorist. It’s not nothing.





	1. DR. COSTELLO’S VETERINARIAN CLINIC

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for the movie! And spoilers in this author's note!
> 
> a) This movie was so fun and I feel like made with me specifically in mind (more bottle episode movies!); and b) this fic diverges from events at the very end of the film -- namely, Chris doesn't die. (Also, I just realized as I was posting this I probably fudged the time line of when Mary Kay cosmetics was founded and when Justine would've been a kid, but, well, Artistic License and my apologies). 
> 
> Last, enjoy the song I basically listened to on a loop while writing this: [chaos arpeggiating](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImYVgrdeiac), of Montreal.

 

 

Suppose I shot you. How’d that be?  
_ BADLANDS _

 

  

* * *

  

He’s bleeding on her. To be fair, she’s bleeding on him, too. There’s gotta be a language where that equals some kind of truce.

Justine leans her weight against the driver-side door, and Chris leans his weight across the front bench seat into her. The pressure feels good, even if her leg has mostly gone pins-and-needles numb. She’s propelled solely by adrenaline, clumsily using her left foot on the gas and the brake pedals, but even that’s starting to wane as she continues to bleed out. Her hands won’t cooperate; it’s like her body is on some sort of non-negotiable time delay. She’s not sure how Chris has managed to cling this long to consciousness (as weak-fingered as that clinging might be) considering how much worse for the wear he is than her.

She had dragged him out with her after, neither one of them able to walk without the support of the other. She didn’t know why she did it then and she doesn't want to think about it now. Later, she’ll try the idea on for size that the plan was to argue a ransom out of the IRA for his safe return, but she’ll know she isn’t going to do that (too much work, too little reward).

She chances a quick glance over to him, even though she's afraid to let her eyes leave the road, like maybe she won’t be able to find it again. Chris’s eyes are closed. Even with his body slumped against her, she can’t tell if he’s still breathing, her own body trembling. 

She shifts her elbow, jostling him, but he doesn’t move.

“Fucking — goddamnit. Jesus Christ.” All that, and he’s dead already.

“What?” Chris mumbles, shaking his head as he struggles to sit up, groaning the entire time, abandoning the effort.

“Oh. Nothing.”

So she drives. Her grip on the wheel keeps slackening as her vision swims, some sort of underworld miasma of wet Boston streets and glowing streetlights stretching endlessly through the dirty windshield. She reaches a red light. She doesn’t really brake but instead rolls forward in slow motion, same as they had crawled all over that warehouse. Hobbled, but still moving.

She can feel Chris wriggling beside her. He raises a slightly crumpled cigarette to his mouth. He struggles to pull the lighter out of his pocket, struggles even more to light it.

“Here,” he says, slipping the lit cigarette between her lips. The paper is wet. The light’s still red. “It’ll help. Did the same thing with Steven.”

“He died,” she says, indignant, the cigarette bobbing. She inhales anyway, waiting for that hit of nicotine, the two of them backlit by the red light.

“Yeah, well. it worked for a little while there.” Chris groans as his torso twists, his arm reaching to take back the cigarette. “‘sides, it was the van that got him, not the blood loss.”

“And would you look at that silver lining,” she says. The light turns green.

 

 

She shot him. Back at the warehouse, Justine had shot him.

Justine first shot Ord in the head and then Chris in the side. The bullet had nearly missed, her aim going slightly wild after the first pull of the trigger, but found its target enough to take a chunk out of him, just below his ribs. Chris made this comical howling sound as he hit the ground and then he went quiet.

She had limped over to him, her boots slipping in the wet muck, the right boot filled with her own blood. She found him still breathing, nearly laughing, the sound breathy and incredulous.

“Hey, say you take me with you, yeah?” Why the fuck would she ever say yes to that. She had the briefcase. She had the cash. She, mostly, had her life.

“You think you can get up?” she heard herself ask instead.

In the distance came the wailing of sirens. “Yup,” he said. “Yup, I’m moving.”

 

 

She pulls into the empty parking lot; the unlit sign above reads, Dr. Costello’s Veterinarian Clinic.

She slithers out of the front seat of the car, uses the hood of it to drag herself around and towards the backdoor to the office. She hears Chris mumble behind her after a high-pitched whine, “I’m just gonna crawl, I’ll meet you there.”

She breaks the window and reaches her already bloody hand through to pop the lock. Chris is facedown at her boots, his hand gripping her ankle. “I think I’m dying,” he says.

“No shit,” she says, but she manages to hoist him up, his body draped over her back, his legs limp and dragging behind him, wearing him like a cape, using the mop tucked along the backdoor as a crutch as she gamely makes her way into the dark office only to be met by the cacophony of barking dogs. Blood smears on the wall when she slaps the light switch up, the fluorescent lights flickering to life. Chris is ghostly, greenly pale, and she’s pretty sure that can’t be good. He leans against the desk now instead of her, his legs giving out under him as he takes to the floor with a grace that implies he meant to do that.

“Who’s playing doctor?” he wheezes. She ignores him: she’s found what she’s looking for — the phone.

Justine dials the number quickly, more blood smeared. It’s gonna look like a fucking crime scene by the time they’re finished here. She tucks the phone between her shoulder and her chin. “I know a guy,” she says to Chris.

A groggy voice finally picks up on the other end of the line.

“Hey it’s me. I gotta a favor I need to cash in. Yes. Right now. I know, you said: don't call me at home. But you owe me. I need you to get down here. Now. Yes, your office. We … ” she trails off. She has no idea how much she can trust Dr. Costello of Dr. Costello's Veterinarian Clinic, but considering she knows him, which means he's a less than stand-up kind of guy, she’s gonna guess about as far as she can throw him (and in her current state that's not at all). Better safe than sorry, right? Hadn’t that been her M.O. up until tonight’s disaster? “My two dogs were shot.” She catches the baffled expression on Chris’s face as he drops down heavily onto the floor next to the table where they neuter dogs or put them to sleep or whatever Costello's planning to do to all these caged-up dogs. “Bring Mikey and as much O negative you can get your hands on. Stat. I have cash,” she says as an afterthought. And then she hangs up.

“My cash,” Chris calls from the floor.

“My cash now,” she says. “I shot you.”

“Don't think it works like that. And don't think I forgot that,” he grunts as he shifts into a deeper slouch, “salient detail.”

Justine crawls over to him with a roll of bandages and some rubbing alcohol. “How about I shoot you again and we find out?” She’s out of breath. She fits her body alongside and against his. She can hear him swallow as her good arm presses down against his wounded one.

“Funny.”

The rubbing alcohol and the bandages go forgotten as they wait, the energy slipping away from her fast now that she’s on the floor. Chris smells awful: cigarettes and dirt, cordite and sweat, old cologne. His breath is fine though; she feels it dance across her face like a warm steady breeze, regularly enough to tell her that he’s still alive. That’s good, that’s real good. She closes her eyes. Then, a jolt, her name, his hand caked in filth and dried blood gripping her jaw too tight.

“I’m here,” she says, even though she thinks she sounds incredibly distant. A pause stretches and he doesn’t say anything. “I could feel you breathing,” she mumbles, “can’t you feel me breathing?”

He grunts again. She starts humming that John Denver song. She doesn’t know any of the words, or if she did, she's forgotten them. This is how Dr. Costello and her paramedic not-friend Mikey find them.

 

 

“Jesus Christ. What the fuck happened to you two?”

“First date,” Justine says.

“Went dutch,” Chris says.

 

 

A few unlicensed bullet extractions, blood transfusions, and copious stitches later (not to mention a future ODing Hollywood starlet’s cache of painkillers crawling through her system), she almost feels functional. She wakes to find herself tucked away in a backroom at Costello’s office. She’d bet the entire contents of that fucking briefcase that Doc Costello is pissed they’re still here. There’s no window in the backroom and tilting her wrist, carefully, and then hissing through her teeth, she finds her watch is broken. Chris is still zonked out on the floor next to her.

When Costello comes through, either fifteen minutes or two hours later, Justine has just barely made it up into a sitting position.

“Hey ya, doc,” she says and tries to grin.

Later, when he’s counting the stack of bills she handed to him and Chris is still little more than passed-out deadweight, he fixes his eye on her.

“I gotta tell you, Katie,” and she frowns before she remembers: he thinks her name is Katie. She told him her name was Katie. “This guy? Shouldn’t even be alive.”

“You don’t say.”

“Who is he?” he says, voice quieter now. “What’re you even doing with him?”

"I have no idea. We just met.”

“Come on, Katie. You think I’m stupid?”

“No,” she lies. “Of course not.”

 

 

Justine has always been a good liar. Embroidering the truth with minor deviations, omitting the pertinent and the damning, mangling factual information until it meets her agenda. Outright making shit up.

The key, she has learned, isn’t believing the lies yourself. That’s what everyone tells you. A good liar believes their own lies. That’s a lie itself. The key is confidence, worn casually and featherlight. Worn like it would cost you something to question anything coming out of this bullshit artist’s mouth.

The key is to care, but only ever about yourself.

 

 

 


	2. ORD'S SAFE HOUSE

Justine doesn’t have a key, so she has to shoot the deadbolt. Her aim is terrible; her arms don’t feel like her arms but someone else’s. Someone who once had a stroke, maybe. Both shots she fires echo noisily in the empty hall. 

“How you know about this place?” Chris asks once he’s earned his breath back from the slow crawl up three flights of stairs to the apartment.

“Ord brought me here once.” Chris arches an eyebrow and Justine scowls. “Not like that,” she snaps.

The apartment is dark and empty when she half-heartedly kicks the door open.

Ord had taken Justine here back when they had some rebel emissaries straight out of Yugoslavia hot on their tails. It was a dumpy apartment then and it’s still one now. Nothing in it but a first aid kit, an arsenal to outfit a rogue black ops team, some of Ord’s expectedly ugly clothing, and curiously, six unopened bottles of Macallan. It’s all still there when Justine and Chris come crashing in.

Ord had told her he had places like this not only in Boston but all over the country, a couple nests even scattered overseas. “I can tell you about West Berlin, but only West Berlin. You wanna hear about Algeria, well, there’s a higher buy-in for that.” He called them safe houses, and it was in that moment and only that moment in his company that Justine felt well and truly out-classed. She didn’t have any safe houses. She hadn’t given any thought to the necessity of having one, let alone over a dozen. She had wanted to ask him how he paid for all that real estate, but figured that was just the kind of wide-eyed naive question he expected of her, so she didn’t say anything at all. Not until later, when she asked him: “Your name’s not really Ord, is it.” It earned the same reaction from him. And it wasn’t.

 

 

Ord clearly hasn’t been by here in a long time: dust has settled on every flat surface, the smell of stale clothing and linens permeates, the fridge empty save for the half-empty bottle of vodka in the top freezer. The apartment is a studio, one room, with mercifully a separate bathroom.

They’re both still dressed in the bloody, filthy clothes they had arrived at Dr. Costello’s wearing, the fabric torn and stiff and reeking.

“You’re not getting in that bed dressed like that,” she says.

Chris starts to laugh and then clutches his side instead. “Listen to that romance there.”

There’e one bed in the apartment, occupying the space against the wall where Justine imagines a couch should probably go. The bed frame is broken, the mattress visibly crooked. It, like the rest of the apartment, looks clean at least. 

In the bathroom (a ring of rust around the shower drain, the stink of mildew underneath the faint antiseptic stink of pine air freshener, a medicine cabinet stocked only with dental floss and Percocet), Justine finds a brand new burgundy bathrobe hanging on the back of the door. The price tag is still attached so she rips it, offers up a silent thanks to Ord. She gingerly pulls it on over her, wincing at its added weight on her shoulder.

She finds Chris already in bed — sprawled out, naked save for a pair of underwear. Not really naked, actually: bandages criss-cross his entire body, his skin bared to her like a shitty burlesque show.

She collapses down beside him on the crooked bed and hears him hiss through his teeth beside her as the mattress shifts, the springs whine.

“So. Wanna fuck around?” he finally gasps, nearly laughing. She laughs for him.

“Shut the fuck up,” she says. And then neither moves for what feels like three days.

 

 

It is three days.

Three days later, and now she’s got to figure out what they’re going to do next. No, she reminds herself: what she’s going to do.

First, she needs to heal. A strangled cry rips out of her throat when she’s in the shower and the cold water hits her body. She feels filthy and disgusting though, can’t imagine going another day without getting clean even if every part of her hurts and aches.

Chris is in worse shape than she is. Checking on his wounds makes her feel wrong and weird in a way she doesn’t care to articulate. It’s too intimate, for one thing. It’s intimate in a way that sharing a bed and bleeding all over each other isn’t and wasn’t. Maybe it’s the skin-on-skin contact; maybe it’s the vulnerability he barely tries to hide from her as she unwraps his bandages.

“You know,” she says, “I really didn’t sign on to play nurse when I saved your life.”

“That’s funny,” he says, his teeth clenched and he hisses, bites down on what sounds like a yelp when she cleans the wound on his leg. She’s not sure what she’s looking for here, but she assumes it’s healing. “I seem to recall you as the reason why I needed the saving, yeah?”

She shrugs with her good shoulder. “Details.” And then, “This is gonna hurt.”

They spend the next several days occupying the same strange middle ground together as they recuperate. It’s still unclear what comes next; she doesn’t like that. She always has a plan. She knows better than to trust Chris, and she hopes he’s smart enough to feel the same towards her. Underestimate her once, you take a bullet. She doesn’t know what else she might do to him.

Beyond all that, she keeps silently interrogating herself, the same questions over and over again: Why did she keep him alive? Is she better with him, or would she be better off without? Justine has always gone it alone. She’s used to relying solely on herself. It’s how you stay alive in a business like this. Self-reliance. Active distrust.

Together they raid Ord’s old supplies. Or, Justine, leaning the majority of her weight on a broom she found and fashioned into a makeshift crutch, raids Ord's supplies and calls back her discoveries to a bed-ridden Chris. Ord's clothes hang too loose on the both of them but they both wear them anyway. She finds unopened cans of tuna and beans and soup and they live off of that when she’s finally able to drag herself upright into the kitchen. Before that, they choked down stale saltines chased with painkillers taken from Dr. Costello’s office and Ord’s medicine cabinet.

They find Ord’s stash of weapons early on. Chris stands beside her, all but drowning in a cuffed pair of Ord’s pants and an oversized undershirt, leaning against the closet’s doorframe rather than her. She’s still wearing the bathrobe, one of Ord’s shirts long enough to reach her thighs underneath.

They stare down at the arsenal.

“I can't decide if this is a relief or,” Chris trails off.

“It’s something,” she says.

She catches Chris’s eye and sees her own suspicion reflected back. For a beat, she swears they’re waiting for the same thing. Her fingers itch but she doesn’t move. 

 

 

Eventually, they run out of the supplies Ord left them.

Justine is the one to head out, swimming in Ord’s clothes and his trench coat. She finds a pair of sunglasses in her car and hides her face behind them. That’s another thing she needs to do: sell this car and get a new one. She needs to erase herself. 

She buys them what they need with haphazard concern for what’s grabbing. She found a roll of cash in the freezer behind the bottle of vodka, thanked Ord again, and doesn’t feel any guilt as she hands off the money to the cashier.

It’s while she’s out that she ducks into a pay phone and calls Barry, one of her old contacts.

“What on God’s fucking green earth happened to you?”

“I — ”

“You got any idea the kind of shit you got yourself in?”

“Well, that’s sort of why I call — ”

“Girl, you made a lot of enemies. And they’re all looking to come right down on you and collect.” He pauses and she exhales tightly. “The Mick too, I guess. But you, girl. You’re who they want.”

“Who’s they?” she asks, unable to keep that indignant tone out of her voice.

“Vern’s boys, for one. And those boys you owed money to in the first place.”

She feels it rising up, quick and fast in her: that quiet panicky feeling she's been trying to keep at bay since she left the warehouse with Chris. Here’s a truth: she was in trouble before she met him. She's never known a life without trouble. She needed money. She needed it bad. She was in trouble before any of this even started.

“Can’t you just tell them I’m dead too?”

“Something tells me these guys? They’re gonna wanna make sure the job’s done to completion. You get what I mean?”

“Yeah, I get — ”

“They’re gonna want a body.”

“Yeah, I said I got — ”

“Or they’re gonna wanna kill you themselves. That’s business."

“Shit.” She goes quiet, pensive, and for once Barry doesn't interrupt her. She’s gotta find a way out. She’s going to find a way. She always finds — “You still talking to Marco?” she asks.

 

 

The underwear she bought for herself, one of those cheap Hanes packs, are too tight. It's just another thing that's got her feeling cranky and on edge. Restless. She's been in the same place for too long.

So she sells the car. She sells her car and she buys a used VW van from a guy who knows a guy who knows Barry who offers her an impossibly low price. Behind Chris’s back and with their cash, she meets with Barry again to get fake I.D.’s — for both her and for Chris. Justine treats the transaction the same as she did when she dragged Chris out of that warehouse: it feels like the right thing to do so she does it. No, not the right thing. The only. If anything, she’s taken to thinking of Chris as an insurance policy. As someone to have with her because she always works best when there’s someone else for her to use if and when she finds herself backed into a corner. When she thinks of him like that, thinking of him in general becomes manageable, no longer a personal flaw. 

“You can thank me later,” she tells him that evening, “but I’ve been working on our exit strategy.” She drops the license down on the kitchen table. He’s stiff as he reaches for it, the human body fascinating in its slow stubbornness against bullet holes.

“Argus Weatherby,” he reads aloud. He looks up at her. “Argus Weatherby? I sound like a bloody cartoon librarian.”

She waves a hand. “Beggars, choosers, you know the drill.”

“What’s your name then?”

“Denise St. Clair.”

“Denise St. Clair and Argus Weatherby? Yeah, sure, that doesn’t sound fake at all, does it.”

“You think you can do better, then by all means.”

He smiles at her, closed-mouthed but sincere and waves the I.D. at her like a salute. When he says, “Thank you,” it almost sounds gentlemanly.

Maybe that's why she braces her elbows on the table and she leans forward. Maybe that’s why she smiles at him in return and she says, “You know, we never did get that dinner.”

 

 

Their first date is at the scarred kitchen table in Ord’s safe house.

She grabbed Chinese food from the takeout joint two blocks down and a bottle of wine from the next door bodega. If it wasn’t for the fact they were in Ord’s apartment and Ord was dead (because of her) and if both of them weren’t riddled with healing bullet wounds (also because of her), it’d almost feel like something normal people who like each other do. An actual first date. If it wasn’t for all that, and for their conversation.

“The curiosity’s been killing me,” Chris says, his lo mein mostly untouched. “You and Martin — what was the plan there?”

Justine sighs. In their time shared in rehabilitative limbo, Chris hasn't once mentioned her role in what went down other than the occasional sarcastic remark about how she shot him. She should've known this was coming. “He was tired of Vern.” She shrugs. “You met him. We were all tired of Vern.” She doesn’t mention all the things everyone had come to hate about Vern in addition to his personality: things like how well Vern had managed to corner the market and how they all knew Vern was a double-crossing piece of shit who’d sooner turn you over to the feds than gamble with his own life. That Vern was an obstacle and there was only one thing to do with him.

“So you were gonna kill him and take my money.”

She points her fork towards him. “His money. You would have given it to him for the guns.”

He doesn’t say anything, so Justine pours them both more wine. “Drink up.”

“Were you planning to kill me too then?” Chris’s face is amused, but it’s also flat, unyielding in a way she’s not entirely sure how to navigate.

She shakes her head, her lips pressed together in a line. “Why do you think I agreed to dinner with you?”

“Drinks. You agreed to drinks. After much agonizing deliberation, I might add.”

“Drinks,” she repeats, and she reaches for her glass of wine. Chris leans forward, a small smile trying.

“Was it because you knew I’d be dead and there’d be no way for me to collect?”

“No.” She lifts the wine glass to her mouth, but then she stills. “It — you — would’ve given me an alibi.”

He stares at her, and then he laughs.

He leans back in his chair, lifts his own glass of wine. “You shot me anyway.”

“You didn’t die.”

“Reconsidering?”

“Yes.” When she smiles, it’s all teeth.

 

 

This is what she likes about him: he has never asked her the obvious question men always feel inclined to ask after meeting her.

“What’s a pretty girl like you doing in an ugly business like this?”

 

 

When she was a girl, Tracy Cooper sold Mary Kay products and broke all the sales records in the tristate area — a real big shot, the pink Caddie and everything. Justine remembers her mother taking her to one of those parties at their neighbor's house and Justine had walked in on Tracy shaking down the hostess in the kitchen over a bowl of malingering jello salad.

“I know folks say you get real far being real nice, and that’s true and all, but what they fail to recognize is you get the extra mile by faking nice. Now buy the fucking lipstick, Carol-Ann.”

Justine’s mother admired Tracy Cooper the same way she admired the majorettes who twirled batons with the marching band: their skills largely useless and unimpressive but entertaining and outside her own abilities. For all that, she was thrilled when Justine took up as Tracy Cooper’s cosmetic-hocking protege.

Justine learned from her first and then she surpassed her. She passed on the pink Caddie in lieu of a big fact check. And then, she took over and took down her empire. She dismantled every little thing Tracy Cooper had worked for simply because she could.

And then she got bored.

That was when she started moving drugs instead of pressed powder and blue eyeshadow. She was seventeen.

 

 

 


	3. $25,000 REWARD EACH

She sneaks out to a different payphone every few days. It’s been two months.

She’s still tender, but she can move around now with greater ease. Chris is better too, but she thinks when it comes to him, that’s a relative term. He has a limp now, more pronounced the more exhausted he is, and he holds his own body like it's a thing that might betray him, might fail at any moment. Chris himself strikes her more and more as one giant exercise in self-betrayal: for example, he still looks at her like she’s something he wants. He doesn't try to hide it, and she’s not sure if he deserves points for transparency or subtracted for stupidity.

Justine continues to collect intel from Barry and she continues to parcel it out piecemeal to Chris. She doesn’t know how you tell someone that you’ve been marked as a traitor by your own country and they’ll kill you on sight, but she tried.

“What?” Chris had said when she told him — that not only had he been branded a traitor for the cause and country, but that they blamed him for Frank’s death. That he was a fugitive of the law, both American and international. Barry had read Justine Chris’s rap sheet over the phone that time and all she had done was arch an eyebrow and say, “I didn’t realize I was bunking down with such hot shit.”

But in Ord’s apartment, Chris had frowned and none of it seemed all that funny to her. He lit another cigarette and inhaled, his face furrowed and unfamiliar to her, deep in a concentration that did not include her. That should’ve been her first warning: it bothered her to think there were parts of him, the current present-day him, that did not include her. She, whether intentional or accidental, had come to include him in everything.

“Where the fuck’s that put me then?” he finally said, looking up at her. His eyes were cold. “How I’m getting home then, huh?”

“Home?” she said. Of all the potential future plans, she didn’t know why she had never considered the possibility that Chris would leave.

But Chris didn’t say anything, so they left it at that. They left it at that, and Justine continues to scour the multi-block radius for payphones she hasn’t hit before.From Barry, she has learned they are boxed in on multiple sides: by the Boston police, by the FBI, by Vern’s men, the IRA. From Chris, she learns that a man’s reputation destroyed is a wound that doesn’t heal, not quickly anyway. The idea of him as a traitor is proving to be too much for that heavy nobility he wears, and Justine can see that. The first thought that comes to mind isn’t how to subdue that but rather use it.

After all, the first thing you do with a man is look for his weaknesses. And then you exploit them.

 

 

They go to bed early each night, like two old people, long married and bored by each other’s presence.

That’s not true, at least not the boredom part. There’s this tension that crackles between them and through the apartment, tripping up their shared atmosphere. They have come to know each other even though neither are people prone to let others learn them. So much remains hidden and disguised, too much remains unknown. She doesn’t know if she wants to know him, but she is certain she doesn’t want him to know her. Or at least that’s the person she wants to believe she is. She wants to remain enigmatic to him, someone he wanted one night before everything went to shit.

“You think I ever get back there?” Chris asks. They’re in bed, and Justine had just been reaching to turn off the lamp. She abandons the effort, laying back down beside him instead, her body now turned to face him. He’s facing her too, that same inadvisable openness in his face that had cracked through his voice.

“Yeah,” she says quietly, even though she doesn’t mean it. His eyes drift over his face, and his mouth lifts in a wry grin. Like he doesn’t believe the girl who doesn’t mean what she says.

“I meant it, you know,” she says then, this time meaning it. “I really am sorry you got in the middle of everything.” She pauses. “And that I shot you.”

“Yeah. I’m real sorry about that one, too.”

“It wasn’t personal,” she says, quieter. “Just business.”

Chris reaches and he cups her face. Her eyes blink open and watch his face. His palm feels good and warm against her cheek. “Why you take me with you then?”

“Death just seemed so permanent.”

He snorts. He tucks a strand of her hair behind her ear. He strokes the curve of her ear. “You take care of yourself, don't you.”

“I do,” she says, as soft as him, but certain. Steady.

He shifts closer, the old springs of the bed whining beneath them, his face right there in front of hers. “You want me to take care of you too, girl?”

Justine frowns. That tidal wave of disappointment finally crashes down inside of her, as if her anticipation that he’s different from any other guy she’s met has allowed it to crest to heights she hadn’t known possible. She tilts her head back away from him. “I thought we were clear I had that covered.”

His smile is bladed when it breaks across his mouth and he moves as if to kiss her, but he doesn’t. “I don’t mean like that.” He sounds as dangerous as he had been in that warehouse. His hand drifts down from her ear to her neck to the outer curve of her breast, barely touching her. Her breath does something jagged and jack-knifed inside her chest. Something she can’t trust. She thinks she wants him to touch her. “You want me to take care of you?” he asks again. “You want me to make you come?” When she exhales, it sounds like the start of an incredulous laugh. Her mouth is practically on his; her mouth could be on his. “You want my fingers, my mouth, my tongue, my cock — you name it. Whatever part of me you want, I’ll give it to you.”

Her heart is beating too fast. “That’s one hell of a proposition.” She tries to say it flat, but there’s still a small hitch in her voice. A tell. Eagerness shines as a glint in his eye as he catches it, his gaze on her mouth. He brings his hand back up to her face and his thumb drifts down over her mouth, parting her bottom lip for him.

“I know you take care of yourself, love, but answer me this — has anyone ever gotten you so wet you’re swimming in it?”

The laugh that cracks out of her is liquid, molten. He’s so goddamn smooth, it’s terrible. She should’ve known he’d be like this. “Oh my god, listen to you,” she laughs.

"That's a no, isn’t it.” Like he knows her. Like he knows anything at all.

So she tells him, “I don’t fuck clients.”

He looks smug, like he caught her in a lie. “Lucky me then. No client. Only a potential adversary.” She likes how that word gets warped by his accent, the slight teasing, mocking tone. As if _adversary_ doesn’t foretell a future fight to the death.

She lets him close the distance between them. Chris kisses her ( _with intent_ , she thinks stupidly, as if she’s already defending herself before a court of law), and fuck, it’s a good thing she kept him alive — at the very least for this. His mouth is both firm and soft against her own, demanding in a way that makes her want to both obey and defy him.

So she says against his mouth, “I knew we keep you cooped up here long enough you’d wanna fuck me.”

He laughs, his breath feathering over her face. “I wanted to fuck you long before that.”

They kiss with the same coiled violence as a standoff before the guns are fired. Impatience makes her press her body against his like she could climb inside him. Chris’s hand goes to the bandage still covering his side as she knocks into him too forcefully, his breath punched out against her open mouth and he rears back from her.

“Gotta admit, not exactly what I had had in mind,” Chris says, but he’s got his hands on the hem of Ord’s undershirt and not the bandage at his ribs, lifted fast despite his clumsy hands and resistant muscles, his pulling wounds. She remembers his hands steadier in that warehouse, curled tight and possessive and sure around the handle of a gun.

What had he expected though? They’d go to dinner, split a bottle of overpriced wine, retire to a bed neither owned? It never fails to amuse her: how men like him, steeped in violence — both petty and brutally outsized — still think they are owed a little bit of tenderness. In particular, from a woman ill-equipped to provide.

Justine quirks an eyebrow; it would be more devastating if she wasn’t so off-balance, half-dressed in only one of Ord’s oversized oxford shirts and a pair of those cheap panties she bought, her mouth already swollen and bruised. His smirk is all unexpected animal cruelty. “Don’t act like you didn’t consider it,” he says.

She shrugs, exhales through a wince when the mostly healed wound in her arm protests. She says nothing and lets him get his hands on her again, trembling and greedy. “I might’ve given it some thought,” she says into the cut of his jaw. “A little thought. A second, a millisecond of thought.”

“I bet you did,” he says.

His mouth is at her ear and then he drags it down along her jaw, her face cupped tight in his grip. “Tell me then, what — if only for a millisecond — did you imagine me doing to you.”

His fingers slide down along the front of her shirt and then under, between her legs, hardly any pressure at all. A tease. He freezes against her when she laughs. She rolls her eyes.

“Men,” she says, turning her head in towards him. His eyes are narrowed and properly suspicious. “Always thinking they’re the only ones with anything worth giving.” She snakes a hand down between them. His cock twitches against her hand, thickens in her grip. She tips her mouth up to him, looks him square the eye.

“How do you know I wasn’t thinking about what I’d do to you?” she asks. She twists her hand to punctuate the question. His lips brush against hers and he grunts.

“Tell me,” he says. There’s a bright-eyed desperation to him that makes her skin prickle. If she’s honest, she had assumed she’d wind up here the second she had agreed to get drinks with him: under him, on top of him, his cock in her hand. Fucking him.

“I thought about taking you apart,” she says, that same low hard tone to her voice. “Piece by piece, making you beg me to put you back together again.”

The effect that has on him is instantaneous.

“Aw, Christ. Do it then,” he hisses. This time she doesn’t laugh.

Most men really are like a dismantled rifle — the pieces are there to assemble something useful, deadly. Like a spent pistol, hot and vibrating in her hands. Ready to be taken apart and rendered useless, all under her direction.

“Do it,” he says again, so she does.

 

 

She takes him up to the brink with her hand and then she backs off.

Just as fast, he’s on her. Like he was waiting for this, her power over him only an illusion. That should frustrate her, and it does, but she ruts up against him all the same, her arm, her leg, both hurt trapped under him like this, but that only seems to make her feel that much wilder. Hungrier.

Chris’s body presses hers down into the lopsided mattress, his cock hard and leaking against her bare thigh. “I know,” and he says it like a laugh, “that you want it, too.” He drags his hand through her hair, and she feels like she can’t trust herself. She doesn’t like that she feels like she is losing control. “You wanna be taken apart, too,” he says. “You want me to take you apart, don’t you?”

It hits too close to a truth she doesn’t want to acknowledge. As if in the time since the shoot-out she has been rearranged, no longer the person she once was, and that is dangerous.

Even out of breath, she moves quick. Justine has him under her, straddling his ribs. She bumps her knee against the bandage and he moans. Weeks ago, Justine had slipped one of the pistols Ord had stashed under her pillow. Called it another insurance policy. She pulls it now and she trains it on him, the gun clutched tight in her hand and pointed down at his face. Chris’s eyes widen for the briefest of seconds before he smirks up at her.

“So this again, yeah?”

“I think there’s something we need to clarify between each other, wouldn’t you say?”

"Love, I’ll say whatever you want so long’s you get that fucking gun out of my fucking face.”

“If only all you boys could’ve been that reasonable.”

“Reason was a far cry from the order of the day.”

“Isn’t that the truth.” She hasn’t lowered her weapon. She can feel Chris tense and ready under her, but his face is somehow both appraising and lax. Arrogant, even. As if even after everything he has seen her do and everything those assholes had done to her and to him, she won’t shoot him. Not again.

She needs to make something perfectly clear. She squeezes her knees into his still sore ribs and he grunts.

“I take care of myself,” she says again, each word stressed. His gaze is half-lidded and he licks at his mouth.

“Show me then.” She knows what he means by that. She shakes her head and instead, after a beat, presses the barrel of the gun against his lips.

“I wanna know,” she says, “if you expect me to trust you.”

Chris doesn’t try to speak, not against the muzzle. His eyes are too bright though, too knowing, creased at the corners as if he’s smiling though his mouth remains immobile and closed.

“I want you to know,” she says, even quieter, “that you have to trust me first.”

His lips part and his mouth opens around the barrel of the gun.

She tries to keep her breath steady despite the low drop in her gut as she watches him. Chris mouths and sucks the gun like a cock (like her cock, she can’t help but think, making her breath go sharp, her thighs tense), filthy and disgusting. She’s gone wrong somewhere, she has to have — icy, cool-headed Justine, getting off on something as unnecessary and fucked-up as this.

She pushes it one further, she tests his trust, when she thumbs the safety off, the gun still in his mouth. Chris moans, no hint of fear, but instead wanton and almost begging. Like he had been telling the truth when he told her she could have anything of his. Even his life. A sound catches in her own throat and she has to shift her hips down against him. It's not enough.

 

 

When she drags the pistol from his mouth, his lips are wet with his own spit, slightly swollen. They both stare and watch each other.

“Come here,” Chris finally says, his voice low and raspy, as if his throat is scraped and raw from her. His fingers dig into her hips as he drags her body up to his mouth. She gets it. He’s the kind of guy who still believes in shit like chivalry. He’s the kind of guy, she knows, who gets off on getting a girl off. Well, then, by all means.

At first, all he does is mouth at her cunt through her panties, making her feel that much wetter. The gun makes a loud _thunk_ when it hits the floor, makes both of them jump.

Both of them are clumsy and sore with their bodies, with each other’s. But he gets her panties off, Justine awkward and uncharacteristically self-conscious as she kicks them down her legs. He idly traces the lines where the elastic bit into her skin, and she likes that, likes the combustive quality of mixing pain and his hands on her.

He mouth latches on her, wet and noisy, as he licks and sucks between her legs. He grips at her thighs — and then, she can’t decide if it’s deliberate or accidental (he’s still too much of an unknown quantity to her, she still can't trust him, she shouldn't trust him), he presses the flat of his hand against the healing bullet wound high on her thigh. Her hips jolt forward, her entire body dropping, seizing into it with a shout that bleeds into a long, drawn-out moan. She distantly hears him groan from beneath her, “Don’t break my fucking nose,” the words muffled. So she squeezes her thighs that much tighter around his ears, barely manages to lift her upper body off of her splayed hands, one hand digging into his hair and pulling. She all but curls her body around his head. His hands crawl up over her hips, trying to still her rocking body, desperation building in her at a pace she can’t keep. She doesn’t think about it: she drags his hand down to press flat against the wound on her thigh. She yells, something. She comes violently, all but ripping his hair out. Gasping, she slumps off of him, her bad leg splayed over him, knee thrown over his shoulder, the rest of her slumped to the side on the crooked mattress. She’s panting. He's panting, too: wild-eyed, chin wet, mustache probably wet, too. She’s supposed to find that disgusting, she thinks. She doesn’t think she does.

Chris grabs her by the knee and she whimpers. He moves slow, like everything hurts him. And it does; it has to, because everything still hurts her. His body is on top of hers and he kisses her, open and as filthy as everything else that has passed between them.

She’s still oversensitive when he pushes his cock into her, like that electricity she has felt threatening between them since they met is now inside her too, shocking her. His weight shifts onto her wounded leg and this sobbing sound sticks in her mouth that he echoes. His hand wraps around her throat as he fucks her, gentle when she thinks maybe she had wanted threatening. He says her name, whining it, the drag and push of his body against and into hers.

She can’t look at him, but there’s nowhere else to look but him. She closes her eyes only to open them again. Like he’s something she has to witness. She has to see what he does to her. What she’s done to him. That cruelty she kept catching glimpses of in his eyes back before the meet went down is now making itself obvious and known, but it’s tempered by something she had no right to expect. Tenderness, she thinks. It’s there, too, when he says again, “I can take you apart, too,” and the only thing menacing about it is the softness with which he says it. And it’s that, not the words, that make her gasp, squirm under him. By the time she comes, she can swear she tastes blood.

 

"They really made Swiss cheese outta you, huh?” she says to Chris, after. All the abuse he took in that warehouse is lain bare and obvious to her now that he's naked. It’s obscene in a way a naked man usually isn’t — like those paintings of saints or whatever, the holy aftermath of gruesome violence.

“What's that now?” More of a mumble than a question, his eyes already closed, fluttering open only to shut again. Nice to know she can still wear a guy out.

Her finger passes over the puckered skin at his hip. His flesh twitches, he sucks in a breath; he keeps his eyes closed. “Nothing,” she says.

 

 

And then it all falls apart, just like that. That snap-your-fingers fast. The next day, over the payphone out by the empty bowling alley behind the grocery store she tries not to shop at too often, Barry tells her: Vern still has a cache of M16s stowed away at the harbor — and he’s got some Libyans lined up to buy them.

“I’ve got bad new and I’ve got bad news,” she tells Chris. “The bad news first — or,” and she arches an eyebrow, holds her arms wide like a game show model unveiling the day’s prizes, ”an opportunity.”

“That motherfucker,” Chris says when she tells him. “So now we got the Libyans after us too?” he asks.

“Not yet.”

“And the other news? Worse or about the same?”

She shrugs. The guns weren’t all that Barry had told her about. “Depends on your outlook, I guess.” He waits out her pause. “We got a $25,000 bounty on our heads. Each.”

“Christ.”

“Turns out,” she says brightly, “we pissed off a lot of people.”

“Can we trust him? Your Barry?”

“He’s not _my_ — it doesn’t matter.”

“Who’s to say he’s got any allegiances to you, yeah? Who’s to say he’s not gonna wanna burn you, too. That’s a lotta money waiting there for him to collect. And he could do it, easy. Feed you a lie about those Libyans and some guns just waiting for the taking, only it’s you and me who go taken.”

“Do you really think I haven’t already considered that?” she snaps.

She doesn’t want to tell Chris that she trusts Barry. She doesn’t like how naive that would make her look. She doesn’t want to believe that saying it out loud will merely open the door for Barry to disappoint her, betray her, go ahead and kill her.

It’s the same reason she had weighed telling Chris about the bounty. It’s a new temptation between them: what if he turns her in? What if she does?

She drums her fingers on the table. “$25,000 is a lot of money,” she says.

“Yeah. It is.” He stubs out his cigarette. “It’s blood money,” he says. She can’t decide if his disinterest is feigned or the genuine article. She’s still learning him; she doesn’t know how to trust someone who seemingly wears his heart on his sleeve.

It’s all blood money anyway.

“Let’s reassess,” she says, like they’re in a board meeting and not Ord’s sad excuse for an apartment, on the lam. “We’ve got a briefcase full of cash and we’ve got a hidden cache of guns waiting down at the harbor.”

“Yes. Let’s reassess. That’s not your cash,” Chris tells her. “Not your guns neither.”

Justine crosses her arms over her chest. “Actually,” and she trails off, holding her hands up. She looks him dead in the eye. “Let’s say we were to split. You don’t get both,” she says to him. _You don’t get either_ , she doesn’t say. “It’s either the cash or the guns you paid for with that cash.” _It’s neither. I’d drop you before I let you take either_. “And I said ‘we.’”

She doesn’t shrink from the pointed look he gives her. She wonders if he can see through her bullshit bravado. She wonders what that means she’s gonna have to do if he can. “You don’t get both then either, yeah?”

It doesn't matter: she's turning something over in her head. She's remembering something someone said to her a long time ago: the only way to get out of the corner they've trapped you in is to distract them with each other until they turn their back on you. The only way to get out is --

“What if I told you we could get more where all that came from?”

“Guns?”

She grins.

“Money.”

“How’s that?”

“Don’t worry — I got a plan.” She leans back into her chair. “I know a guy.”

 

 

Later that night, Justine heads out to the payphone at the gas station.

“Is this Marco?” she asks.

 

 

 


	4. DOUBLE BULLSEYE

Justine is a professional. This isn’t her first job.

She left the school after the bell rang, her books clutched close to her chest. She was a good student: all A’s, perfect attendance, a decent showing with the debate team. She waved as she passed people she called her friends and people who called her their friends and then ducked into the alley that abutted Fremont. She followed the alley down, not breaking a sweat. Not yet.

This was her first job.

She ducked in through the back exit of Vito’s Pizzeria, and it was when the door shut behind her — the push of the chilly autumn air replaced by the garlic-scented fug of Vito’s kitchen — that she heard it: the hammer pulled back, the cock of a gun.

She didn’t turn her head.

“You’re gonna wanna put that gun down,” she said. Her voice shook only a little; she was sweating now. She blamed the pizza ovens and her wool peacoat.

She saw the gun waving out of her peripheral vision. That meant neither of them were steady. This was the first time she’d ever had a gun pointed at her, and a part of her knew it wouldn’t be the last.

“Gimme the stash,” he said. He sounded young, but not as young as her.

“Oh, you’re gonna wanna take that back,” she said. She was calm. She had this in hand. She turned her head and met his eye. The shake of her head was barely perceptible, but he saw it. She knew it.

And then Vito himself clocked him in the back of the head with a fire extinguisher.

When she was picked up later that year, she drowned herself in crocodile tears in the interrogation room and then walked out, free. When Vito was arrested, he blamed his son rather than Justine. Justine learned a lot from Vito. She learned that the best thing you can ever do for yourself is betray someone else. You sell them out, and you get everything. It didn’t matter that working together could’ve earned them a better shared reward. That didn’t occur to her then, and it wouldn’t occur to her for a good long time. And by then she’d know: she’s fucked.

 

 

“It’s a bad goddamn idea.”

“It’s a _smart_ goddamn idea.”

“Now you know that just isn’t true.”

Justine rolls her eyes at him. Since she had called Marco a few nights ago, they’ve had the same argument with only slight variation half a dozen times. She reaches only to find her glass empty; she puts it back down onto the table. “I’m not saying we’re going to do anything more than look.”

“Yes. You are.” He refills both of their glasses with Ord’s scotch. “Nobody stakes nothing out unless they’ve already got intentions designed.”

She stares him down. “I just want to see.” The words glide easy, across the calm, unimpeachable way she says it. “I just want to know the facts.”

“The facts are these: you’re gonna get us both killed, woman.”

Maybe. The plan is this — they stake out the shipping container down at the docks that’s in one of Vern’s aliases (Mike Hunt; he would) and see what the security situation looks like there, the odds of breaking in there to get the guns and selling them themselves. 

“Like I said,” she says, “there’s no risk in looking.” He quirks an eyebrow before taking a throat-burning pull from his glass. When he returns his gaze to her, his eyes have gone that much darker. She can feel it, a change in the atmosphere in the room. Dangerous, that knife’s edge where you teeter between something happening and something not.

“No harm in looking,” she repeats.

They haven’t touched each other since that night they fucked. She’s not drunk, but she has that buzzing in her head that makes the rest of the world feel both distant and like something she invented, something easily conquered. 

Justine has always known how to get what she wants.

“You said you wanted to see?” she says. She’s only wearing one of Ord’s tacky paisley print button-down shirts and a pair of the cheap white cotton panties she had picked up during one of her early supply runs. She reaches down and presses her fingers against the crotch of them, the table blocking his view until she moves. Makes sure he has the best seat in the house. 

Justine does it partly because she wants to make sure she has him — owning a man sexually is always the easiest way to sway them to what you want. All hungry girls learn that lesson too early on. 

She also does it because she wants.

 

 

Justine’s always been interested in seeing what men do when the collar of exerted power and control comes down around their necks. Chris doesn't fight it; if anything, he gives into it. He gets off on it. 

She watches Chris reach for his belt buckle, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows. As he watches her rub herself through the cotton. “No,” she says. The point is looking. The point is she’s gonna make him watch her without touching himself: “No touching,” she says, her voice still steady. He glares at her, but he obeys. She bites down on a grin that could only be described as shit-eating. 

She opens her shirt and he watches. She takes off her panties and he watches. Her own breath catches, quietly stutters out of her, when she finally slips two fingers inside herself — as if for a moment she let herself forget the game. When she touches her bare breast, he groans, grinds the heels of his palm against himself through his pants. She stops.

“I told you. No touching.”

His laugh leaks out as a shaky exhale. She’s that much rougher with her fingers, her head tipping back, unsure now how much of this is for him versus herself, as she says, “I want to suck it when I’m done.”

Chris groans, loud. She looks at him through half-slit eyes. “Christ, woman. You’re killing me.”

“Good,” she says. 

When she does get on her knees in front of him, he’s practically shaking. She makes him suck her wet fingers first. And then she sucks him down. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he pants, his hips bucking up. She pulls off of him, the entire thing obscene — his swollen cock head, the line of her spit and his come connecting it to her mouth, the look on his face cast half in shadow as he watches her. 

“They won’t help you now, baby,” she says lightly, droll, and he sort of laughs, incredulous, the sound trembling same as his hands when he cups the back of her head, pulls at her hair. It’s unbelievably quick and easy to make him come; it’s easy to get what she wants. She lets him fuck her mouth.

 

 

He agrees to stake out the harbor.

They sit in her bargained VW van for hours, passing back and forth the pair of binoculars they found amidst Ord’s military-grade gear.

Chris hasn’t left that tiny apartment in weeks, save to catch some chilly afternoon sun out on the fire escape while he smoked. He keeps the window rolled down in the van, slouched low in his seat, his gaze critical as it sweeps over the docks. There’s hardly anyone around.

There’s not a whole lot of security on the docks, least of all near Vern’s shipping container. There’s a lone guard pacing the docks down near the water, obvious and ill-disguised. All the better for the both of them, considering Chris still isn’t exactly punching at his fighting weight.

Justine drums her fingers on the steering wheel. Over the weeks, the two of them have learned how to be comfortably silent with each other. But, now, Justine finds herself quietly yammering on as they watch and wait. She needs him to say yes to this deal. 

“You know, I appreciate you never went and tried to convert me to your cause,” she says, teasing. 

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Though I do look pretty great in a black beret.”

“How’d you like I go and mock your great cause.”

Justine leans towards him. “My one and only cause in this whole wide world is cold hard cash, my friend. And we all know how easy a target that makes for mockery.” He shakes his head, but she catches the start of a reluctant smile.

“This could get you back home,” she says quieter. She stares straight ahead out the windshield towards the locked container. It’d be the two of them, she tells him, and a couple of Cuba Libres down in Key West before he’s taking a boat to Mexico via Havana and then popping a squat on a steamer bound for England. “You get to use them as your port of entry. Won’t that make you feel good.” 

Chris doesn’t say anything. When he does, it’s mumbled around a cigarette. “You can rest easy with the hard sell, y’know. Not like I got any other options, yeah?”

“Well, I didn’t want you to look at it like that,” she says, and then she grins.”Is that a yes then? To the deal?”

He surprises her then. “No,” he says. “It’s not. Not until you’re straight with me. Out with it. What’s the plan, because no way it's just a buy. You thinking of boosting the guns, that it?”

“Nothing so gauche,” she says still watching the lone figure at the edge of the dock. “We’re gonna sell them. And then we’re gonna steal them back.”

 

 

“You called Marco? Jesus Christ, Justine.”

This was before the stakeout. Before Chris agreed to that, let alone the rest of her plan.

“You gave me his number, Barry. Not sure what you thought I was gonna do with it. ‘sides, how else was I gonna get ahold of the Libyans?”

“You’re supposed to be on the lam, girl," he said. "Not out there starting World War fucking III. You know he’s gonna tell what remains of Vern’s boys, if he ain’t already, you’re still in the picture.”

She wound the cord around her finger. “I’m counting on it.”

 

 

“This isn’t a plan. It’s a suicide mission.”

Justine shrugs. “Only if we fail.”

Justine has always been good with compartmentalizing. She laid out the rest of the plan when they got back from the docks — or, at the least, the part of the plan that requires Chris: they arrange a deal with the Libyans, the very deal Vern had already put into motion before his untimely demise, and they sell them the guns. They get the money. They steal the guns back, or Vern’s men do, and they ambush and steal them back from them. And then, like she said in the car parked at the docks: pack up the VW van and head down south. He takes a ship back to the beloved home country and it's like they never even met. 

“Failure is built into the plan. You think we can trust anyone involved in this deal?”

“Of course not.” She searches his face and doesn’t find anything she can use. “They can’t trust us either though.”

“Of course they can’t, you got more double-crosses plotted than a, than —” he shakes his head, unable to complete the metaphor. 

“But we get their money and we get the guns and we get another opportunity to sell them elsewhere.”

“You’re suicidal,” he says. “And that’s fine, go to your grave, girl, but I won’t be joining you.”

Her mouth drops into a frown. The plan requires his cooperation, and he knows it. She can't walk in there alone, not now. Not when she’s already invited too many parties to the table.

“We already have the one case.” He nods towards the closet where they keep the briefcase alongside Ord’s assault rifles. She hates the gentleness of his tone, the bargain built into it. She hears what he’s not saying, not out loud. They leave the guns, and they start fresh some place else. She doesn’t like that; it requires her to rely on him for too long. That right there is too dangerous for her. She doesn’t tell him that.

“It’s not enough.” She can taste the steel in her mouth.

“So it’s greed she’s all about.”

“Fuck you. Just because my self-preservation doesn’t look like yours doesn’t make it any less valid.”

“Love, this ain’t self-preservation you’re selling here. It’s madness for madness’s sake.”

“You’re afraid.” She says it like a dawning revelation. They’ve never fought before; she wants to know how dirty he’s willing to fight with her. 

“I’m cautious.” He points at himself and then at her. “I don’t believe in unnecessary risk.” His voice is rising now, anger tightening his face. “I am trying to protect the both of us.”

“Oh please. Chivalry’s dead and I don’t need it,” she snaps.

“Believe me, I know. I watched you put it down and give it last rites in that warehouse, girl.”

She can’t decide if she’s angrier with him or with her. She thought she had rebuilt him as more compliant than this. She thought he trusted her. 

“This?” She says, gesturing between the both of them, like she doesn’t have a name for all that has come to live inside that space. “This doesn’t work without trust.”

He arches an eyebrow. “Believe me, I am well aware.”

She doesn’t like how he says that. Like she’s the problem here, not him. “Trust is the cornerstone of any relationship.” She lets mockery lift her voice into something ugly. 

“Oh, it’s a relationship now she says."

“Don't do that. That’s not attractive.”

He fixes her with a glare; if she was anyone else, she might’ve flinched. “We're long well past that.”

He takes a step towards her; she forces herself not to move. 

“I know what you’re about, girl. You use people. And me? I’m not gonna be one of them.”

“Oh, you’re not.” A mean smile warps her mouth. “You don’t know me. You’ve been plenty of use already.”

"The fuck that's supposed to mean?” It’s almost like Chris looks hurt. She can feel a tic at the corner of her jaw but she keeps her face blank. “You’re empty,” he says. “You got nothing in you.”

“I know,” she spits back.

She finally takes that step back away from him. She holds her hands up as if in defeat. “We get the cash and we get the guns,” she says. “You’ll get your cut of the cash, and then you can go wherever the fuck you wanna go. Can you trust me enough to do that?” She had meant to sneer it, but it sounds too honest.

“Should I?” he says, equally quiet. 

“Your funeral,” she says and then she leaves.

 

 

She goes to a bar. No one knows her here. She throws back a couple shots of tequila, as sour and bitter as she feels, and then starts throwing blunted darts at the much-used board. 

Mistakes were made. There’s no denying that. Mistakes were made, and if she’s gonna tell the truth, here it is: mistakes are still being made. Not necessarily by her, but generally. And also definitely by her. She’s too personally invested. She can see that, but what she can’t see is how she stops. How she's gonna get out of this. 

A man dressed like a happy hour accountant ignores the scowl on her face and the darts in her hand and approaches her. “You come here often?” 

“No,” she says. He doesn’t take the _no_ for the dismissal it is. He settles against the pool table alongside her, ignoring the game in progress.

“And what’s a pretty girl like you do for a living?”

“It would seem,” she says, collecting the darts from the board, still refusing to look at him, “I have fallen into a career as a black market arms dealer.”

“You don’t say,” he says like she didn’t say. Like she could’ve said anything and he would’ve had the same reply. 

“Yeah. And here my high school had voted me Most Likely to Be Crowned Miss America.”

“What was your talent?”

She throws a dart. “Marksmanship.” Bullseye.

 

 

She goes back to Ord’s. She takes the long way, cutting through alleys, swaying on her feet. She’s drunk in that mean way she hasn’t been in a good long time. The kind of drunk that leaves you thirsty, wanting to crash a bottle over someone’s head, see whose eyes you might be able to claw out. 

The wind is picking up, and she bats her hair out of her face, irritated with herself as much as anyone else. This is the first time there’s been this level of personal conflict between her and Chris. She’s not sure what she expected — smooth sailing until they either decided to part ways or until they betrayed and destroyed each other. She wonders if they’ve arrived at the second option. She finds a bizarre loneliness in the thought, hates it immediately. It's the same loneliness that used to define her life before she met him. God, she never should’ve met him. She should’ve left him to die.

The lock is still busted on the front door. She pushes one of the chairs from the kitchen table under the handle once she closes it behind her. 

And then Chris pushes her back against the door.

There is a tense and silent moment where they both just stand there, too close, too close maybe to see each other for what they are, but just as suddenly he’s on her, pressing her bodily against the door, kissing her. They’re both impatient with each other and still angry, biting mouths, scratching, grabbing hands, still not talking. This — mouths demanding flesh and spit instead of words and explanations, hands punishing, the merciless collision of all the angles of his body into hers — is both easier and worse. She wordlessly yells out when he pushes into her, all aggression, his bony hips grinding against hers painfully. It’s cathartic, in the strangest way. She comes before he does, and she makes him pull out (curious, almost concerned, look crests across Chris’s face; he’s learned her, he knows her by now, knows she likes it best when he fucks her just after she’s come, when she’s oversensitive and everything feels too immediate and too much, he knows too much about her). 

“I got what I wanted,” she says, sharp and cruel, but she’s out of breath. But there’s this weird note of apologetic tenderness that has crept in to her voice. She doesn’t like that. She doesn't trust it.

She’s still trapped against the front door, the wood still rattling in its frame against her back. His eyes gleam in the gloomy light of this prison of an apartment. He fists his own cock and starts to pull, his free hand braced against the door beside her head.

“Fuck you,” he says, breathlessly. He doesn’t take his eyes off her once.

 

 

Silence is resumed between them the next day. He chain-smokes at the kitchen table, reads these weather-beaten le Carré novels he found in Ord’s bedside table.

Justine makes plans. 

She’s taken to regularly stopping in post offices and grocery stores to see if there are flyers with their faces on them. There aren’t. If anyone is looking for them — and she’s sure there is someone, somewhere, looking — it’s not through any official channels. 

She sneaks out to the payphone two nights later. 

“Operator? Yeah, FBI Boston field office.”

When she gets back up to the apartment, she finds Chris is still asleep. Or he’s feigning sleep. She gets into bed behind him, tentative, unsure, before she fits her body against his. They fit well. Her hand curls against the nape of his neck, and he makes a sleepy noise low in his throat. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I’m just,” she pauses, unsure what she was going to say, “I’m not a very good person, that’s all.” 

Chris doesn’t turn to face her, but she does hear him say, “I’m not either.”

She lays there, still. There is a part of her that’s always been consumed by dread and she can feel it swelling darker and larger, like a storm cloud over the water threatening landfall. There’s one piece, one party, left to her plan, and once assembled, once it comes together — they’ll be free. 

“Don’t you want to get out of here?” she asks him, her voice more desperate than she should ever permit it to be. He doesn't answer. 

 

 

“We’ll do it. Set the date.” It's been three days of quiet brooding and secondhand smoke, Chris keeping quietly to himself, Justine delivering missives to all interested parties via a rotating succession of phone booths with the same message: hang tight.

“Yeah?” She doesn’t bother to try to hide her relief (genuine) or her surprise (staged). 

“The Libyans get the guns, though. None of this double-crossing. I want this neat. We get the money, we’re gone.”

“Sure,” she says. “It’ll be simple.”

He shakes his head. “You saying it’ll be simple makes me think it’ll be anything but.”

 

 

The deal is set for the next evening, nine o’clock.

Justine is good at compartmentalizing: she has ignored the quietly building stress inside her, the worry that comes with a deal this size and scale. She was burned before. It won’t happen again. It can’t.

Her and Chris fuck again that night. 

There’s a part of her that agrees with Chris. That wonders what it’d be like if they just ran. They forgot the guns, they took the money they had. They went south after all, Florida. They bought a boat. Lived off the radar and off the cash in the briefcase. Made money the legitimate way. Impossible. She pulls his body closer, into, hers. Impossible. 

Face-to-face, his body on top of hers — the intimacy of it is too much, so she tells him to stop, wait, she rolls over onto her stomach and mutters into the damp pillowcase, “Like this.” She feels him haul her hips up, his fingers brushing against the wet between her legs, his mouth biting at the knob of her spine, groaning as he pushes back into her, her own noises muffled against the pillow.

She took what she wanted. She doesn’t know why she took him with her. She doesn’t know why she didn’t kill him when she had the chance. She doesn’t think she wants to know. She thinks she already does.

She comes with a noisy cry, but she wants more. She pushes her hips back against him, but he comes too soon. His softening cock slips out of her, so she slips three fingers inside herself and grinds down. His sweaty body is still draped over hers, heavy, sticky; his hands are on her breasts then his hand is down between her legs, joining hers — she’s full of the both of them then, her chest heaving as she rolls under him, twisting, changing the angle, repeatedly clenching around her knuckles and his. He’s saying something low and quiet she can’t understand. She keeps making these cut-off panting half-sobs, her own fingers slipping out and then its’a ll him — three fingers, four, she doesn’t know, but the stretch is incredible, she's full, so full. He told her to take what she wanted, and that’s all she’s done since she met him. 

After, Chris lights a cigarette. 

“Christ, woman,” he says.

 

 

How’d the other story go? The one where Steve-o and Harry had never met and they sold the guns and they bought the guns and she left, but not without that last backwards glance, that brief knowing look over her shoulder at Martin. She would've demanded a steak and Chris would’ve said, “So dinner it is then?” and she would have grinned at him and made sure he could see all of her straight white teeth in her wide mouth as she said, “I’m starving.” And then — the guns, the money, Martin meeting her in three days as planned at the Budget Inn out near the Road House and the bowling alley, Room 113. By then Chris would be in Ireland or on his way back to Ireland and Vern would be dead and she would have been well on her way. On her way, to wherever that might’ve been.

She’s not sentimental enough to wonder if in this other story they might have kissed the same. The urgency would be gone, the well-earned toll that comes from being a survivor. Their bones would’ve been lighter and their bodies less marked and she wonders if that same impulse would’ve been there, bright and wet behind those teeth she had shown him: to bite him in half. To eat him alive. To let him just try and get a piece of her, too.

 

 

 


	5. TWO BRIEFCASES

This isn’t a love story.

It’s the day of the meet. Justine is in the shower and past the patter of low water pressure she can hear Chris at the sink. She turns the shower off and she throws the mildewed shower curtain open. He’s at the mirror, she sees, shaving with a straight razor. He’s about halfway done when she steps over the lip of the tub, a threadbare towel wrapped tight around her, wet hair dripping down her shoulders. He glances at her quickly before resuming with the blade. 

She steps behind him. Barefoot, he’s just that much taller than her. It’s not much. 

The mirror is fogged up. He stills as she reaches over his shoulder to rub her hand over the condensation, revealing their blurred reflection.

“Here, let me,” she says, taking the razor from him. There is the tiniest beat of hesitation before he cedes it to her.

Her towel loosens as she steps around to face him, finish what he started. She reaches for the corner of it, but he stops her, a tight hand around her wrist and so she lets the towel drop. He’s in an undershirt and boxer shorts, leather gun holster on without the guns. She’s naked as she takes the blade to the corner of his jaw, the minor tic there.

“You trust me?” she asks as the blade scrapes. He looks over and down at her; she raises her gaze to meet his.

“Why wouldn’t I?” he says.

She lets him see her smile, lets her thumb brush the corner of his mouth. Each time she thinks like this — that she is letting him experience a bit of herself — she realizes just how far she has betrayed herself: she’s the one making allowances for herself. 

“Do you trust me?” The question is a low rumble, the emphasis on the final word, and Justine stills. Her mouth twists, rueful; only he would ask that, like he's not the one with the blade at his throat. 

She lifts her eyes to meet his. They’re kinder than the rest of his face will allow, as if all generosity is centered there and cannot reach the harshness of the rest of his face. It’s a face that never learned how to yield.

“Yeah,” she says. She doesn’t blink. She’s still holding the blade. She lets herself believe that maybe she’s telling the truth.

 

 

Marco is waiting at the docks. Shipping container 389153. 

“Allow me to make the introductions,” Justine says, that salesgirl smile lighting up her face. She can feel Chris watching her face. She wants to know if he’s thinking of how he had first met her. How she had smiled at him and Frank the same way. She wonders if he counts that as a betrayal. It shouldn’t; her mouth learned to be honest under and against his. 

“Who we waiting on?” Chris asks. 

“Everyone,” Marco says. 

Chris wanders over to the water’s edge, his hand already reaching for the gun stashed in his waistband. 

“Itchy trigger finger?” Marco asks her. 

Justine shakes her head, eyes still trained on Chris. “Cautious.”

Marco snorts. “Not enough, I’d say.”

She turns her attention towards Marco. “What's that supposed to mean?”

That fella you got with you? You do know he’s at least half in love with you. At least.”

“Oh boy,” she says, flat, crossing her arms over her chest. “That’s at least half too much.”

The Libyans are the first to arrive. They take an instant dislike to Chris, bickering already about the M16s and the price. “Boys and their toys,” she grumbles under her breath, leaving them to it. 

“I never even met a single blessed soul from Libya, so there’s no grief, not from me,” she hears Chris say.

“You’re meeting a Libyan right now.”

“This is — this is true, but,” Chris says, and then he holds his hands up again. “You’re gonna get your guns.”

And they do. They have just finished loading the truck with the M16s when Justine's plan finally goes into play.

They all still then as they hear it: the crunch of tires, the slam of first one and the two more car doors. Chris’s face goes tight as his head darts to look at the new arrivals. “Don’t you worry. Everyone is gonna get what they want,” she says and she smiles. She thinks maybe she should’ve warned Chris better, held the blade that much harsher against his throat. 

They watch as a trio of men in tacky leisure suits approach, gold medallions bouncing against their chests, more swagger than a meet like this demands. She only recognizes one of them, but it’s enough. 

“Who’s this now?” Chris hisses at her.

“Old friends of Vern,” she says. 

“What the fuck did you do?” Chris says, a wild look of alarm he quickly tamps down.

“All part of the plan, baby.” His face is unreadable now. Good. She wonders how long he can maintain that as she watches what have to be two plainclothes FBI agents approach from behind. 

“What the fuck, Justine?” Marco moans, grabbing her arm. “You brought the law here?”

All it takes, one mention of the law, and everyone’s got a weapon drawn. Everyone including Boston’s Federal Bureau finest. 

It worked, she thinks. She has to fight the urge to laugh. They’re all here.

She looks over to her side, prepared to offer a small apology to Chris, but he’s not there. He’s not alone. He’s with three men, off to the side, and she knows, the second she looks at them she knows — the goddamn IRA. They found them, too. They were waiting. That's what Chris was scoping out along the docks when they arrived. She swallows. 

_Look at me_ , she thinks, and miraculously, coincidentally, he does. She catches the glint of metal in his hand. So, she’s the only one empty-handed then. 

Justine wants to tell him that desperation and hunger do funny things to a girl. You could say they bend her out of shape. You could say they shape her into something else, something sharp and mean. Deadly, even.

She thinks he’d understand. After all, he has his weapon aimed at her now.

 

 

This is not a love story.

She met Chris for the first time at an Irish pub. She had been late; it had been by design. If she’s learned anything in this business is you saw what a man was all about when you kept him waiting. 

When she arrived, both Chris and Frank stood, but it was Chris who took her hand and it was Chris who pulled a chair out from the beer-stained, cigarette-marked sticky table for her. 

“A gentleman,” she had said, teasing just enough.

Frank’s face and voice were deadpan: “A fucking sap.”

And then she smiled, but only at Chris. 

 

 

Chris’s gun is pointed at her. Justine lifts her arms, a gesture of surrender if there’s ever been one, and she freezes. Deep down she had been waiting for this: for him to betray her. It almost feels like a relief. Almost.

“Chris,” she says. No one else moves. They’re a fucking melodrama stage play. 

“Like you said, love,” he says. “Not personal, just business.”

Her mouth lifts in a sad smile. “Yeah. I did say that, didn’t I. I was full of shit!” she raises her voice louder. She meets his gaze. “It was fun while it lasted, huh?”

She watches the softening of his mouth and his eyes. It’s like a magic trick designed solely for her. She wouldn’t even notice except she’s spent the last months cataloging each and every stupid thing about him without even realizing it. She catches the near imperceptible shake of his head, his eyes still the kindest thing about him. She bites the inside of her bottom lip to keep from smiling wider.

“Go on then, boy,” one of his men says.

And so he does. He shoots her.

 

 

She had met with Ord before all of this went down. He was stoned, but he was always stoned, sitting there, sucking on that joint in a pub in Boston like there wasn't a goddamn thing for him to be ashamed of. Knowing Ord, that was probably true.

He had told her, in that nonnegotiable tone, that he would take point on this. That was exactly how he said it: take point, like he had never left the military and never left ‘nam. Whatever. If it meant one less conversation with Vern for her to endure, that was fine by her. 

“You know what this is, don’t you?” Ord had said.

“No, but I’m dying to know,” she said, no inflection.

“This?” And Ord pointed down at the table for emphasis. “This is the origin story of our future criminal enterprise.” Justine said nothing and watched as Ord drained the rest of his pint. “All villains and all great world leaders have the best origin stories,” he said, as if this was common knowledge. 

“That’s not true,” she said, frowning. She didn't read comics, but she had dealt with enough men who did. “Heroes do, too. Radioactive spiders. Orphaned aliens. Orphans, generally.”

Ord shook his head, exhaled into the back of his hand. “Nah. I mean, they got origin stories, we all got origin stories — first there’s the gleam in ma and pop’s eye, and then the honeymoon and the playground bullies and so on and so forth. But the hero? His is always the same. It’s always overcoming adversity, the same old morality tale. A story of adopted responsibility. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, blah blah, blah.”

“Sure,” she said, though she wasn’t sure whether she agreed or cared enough to disagree.

“The villains though? It’s all about power. The assumption and the maintenance of it.” He leaned back in his chair. “Infinitely more interesting.”

She crossed her arms over her chest and looked away from him so he couldn’t see her rolling her eyes.

“So we fucking, or what?” he asked.

“Or what,” she said.

 

 

Chris’s shot clips her in the shoulder and she spins. The same goddamn arm she got shot in last time, Jesus. 

Justine yells as she hits the ground, the pain brighter and more terrific than she had remembered. And with her eyes squeezed shut and writhing, she hears more shots fired off. She braces herself for impact, but nothing. More shots then, a total fucking cacophony of panicked confusion and bullet-ridden terror. 

Clutching her bloodied shoulder, Justine watches in mute horror and amazement as Chris opens fire on his own men and any other man within his eye line.

Justine scrambles to her feet, ducks behind a crate. “Please don’t be explosives,” she mutters to herself. “Please don’t be explosives.” She glances down at the trail of blood she left in her wake, leading right to her. She curses under her breath. Her hands are clumsy as she pulls her own gun, praying all she’s gonna have to do is wait this shit out.

This had been the plan: you play everyone off of each other. You let them all pick each other off. And then you take everything they left behind. 

Everything plays out faster here than in that warehouse. For one, they’re all more capable gunmen. Bodies already litter the dock; she hears a scream and then a splash as someone hits the water.

She sneaks a peek from behind her crate. Chris is still on his feet, and she watches him fire off round after round. And she watches Chris take a bullet to what looks like the neck. He drops. She yells his name and she’s running before she’s even thought it through. She doesn’t know when self-preservation came to include him, too.

Her aim and her bullets skew haphazard as she scrambles over to him. The bullet had grazed his neck enough to leave a bloody mess, but he’s fine. He’s down, but he’s fine. 

She looks down at him. It’s starting to rain. 

“We gotta stop meeting like this,” he wheezes, a dumb smile on his face.

“You shot me,” she says, but she’s grinning.

“Yeah,” he says, laughs, the sound gravely and pained. “I’d say that makes us about square.”

The screams and bullet fire are still all around them like one of those fucking war movies she never watches, but nowhere near enough to reach them. But it’s starting to peter off, not enough men left on their feet. 

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks.

She offers him a brief closed-mouth grin; she watches his face soften as he charts it, witnesses her own ragged tenderness. “Now I know.” She sways a little. “Guess I can trust you, huh?” Someone is whining farther down the dock, otherwise it’s gone quiet. Both of them stumble towards the Libyans’ briefcase, left unattended in the midst of all the bloodshed. Justine points towards the truck with the guns and Chris shakes his head, laughing quietly.

“Any other tricks up your sleeve I should know about?”

He helps hoist her up into the passenger seat. She can feel a manic laugh threatening its way up her throat as she limply tries to lift her arm.

“Other than most of my blood? Nope.” And then she promptly passes out. 

 

 

Justine comes to, and she finds herself in a motel room. She blinks at the landscape on the wall directly in front of her as her vision settles — three horses running, the dust kicked up by their hooves, the perspective completely off. Her shoulder aches, like one of those horses had maybe kicked her. A tight gauze bandage covers it and she still has dried blood under her fingernails. Merv Griffin is on the TV handing a woman a million dollar check. The things she’d do for a payout that size.

“You know what I’d do for a check like that?” she asks, her voice croaking and rusty. Chris is on the bed next to hers; he doesn’t look at her. There are two briefcases on the floor between them.

“I can only imagine,” he says. 

“Where are we?” She struggles to sit up, and then thinks better of it. 

He tells her: North Carolina. The truck they stole, along with the M16s, is parked out back.

Her mouth flickers into a smile. 

“So,” she says, rolling cautiously to face him. “Let’s regroup. We have the guns, and now we have two briefcases full of someone else’s cash. You can’t go back to Ireland and I certainly can’t go back to Boston.” She pauses. “You ever been to Colombia?”

Chris glances sidelong at her. “We’re gonna need a plane.”

She smiles. “I know a guy.” 

She settles back against the pillows and lets a companionable enough silence pass between them. Chris breaks it. He perches on the side of his bed, his hands clasped between his legs, a square bandage on his neck as if compliments of a particularly aggressive vampire. 

“First though, there’s something I gotta ask you. I never did get a real answer outta you, so I’m asking you again. Back in that warehouse, what you save me for anyhow?”

The corner of Justine’s mouth tips up. “We had plans for dinner. And I was hungry.”

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> widespindriftgaze @ tumblr for more Good Content™ lol


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